Industry news

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has announced that it has signed an IT desktop services outsourcing contract expanding the scope of services CSC provides to Zurich Financial Services Group (Zurich). The new agreement has a six-year base period at an estimated value of $399 million with a two-year extension option.

Under the contract, CSC will assume responsibility for the provision of Zurich's electronic Workplace (eWP) desktop services to its businesses in the United States, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Spain. The scope includes global service desk, local on-site support, and software packaging and distribution to approximately 51,000 users. The eWP service will provide Zurich with the cost and performance benefits of a globally standardised desktop service environment while allowing organizations within Zurich to tailor services specifically to their business needs and locations.

'We are pleased to announce this expansion of our relationship with Zurich," said CSC Chairman, president and CEO Michael W. Laphen. "CSC's global expertise in desktop computing services will provide Zurich's businesses with access to innovative technology and services and bring new levels of efficiency in support of Zurich's global IT strategy."

Michael Paravicini, CIO at Zurich Financial Services Group, said, "CSC already provides support for the development and maintenance of our application software, and our expanded relationship will allow us to provide a more integrated holistic solution for both our eWP and application support needs."

CSC's relationship with Zurich began in July 2004 when they signed a landmark seven-year global IT applications outsourcing contract. Through the agreement, CSC provides all applications development and support services to Zurich's businesses in the US, the UK, Switzerland and Germany.

French outsourcer Atos Origin has announced Q1 revenues this morning of €1.42bn, up 5.3%. The company's contract wins were up 11% year on year.

Ovum analyst Phil Codling said: 'These numbers help to confirm Atos Origin's return to stable growth, as also evidenced by results in the second half of 2007. The company's “303” transformation programme continues to pay dividends in a number of ways, most noticeably in the sales performance.'

Order growth is particularly encouraging, added Codling. 'The company's investment in its sales capability (for example through the much-attended “Atos University”) is beginning to pay off. We feel Atos Origin's growing focus in the market is helping too. Not only is it targeting its efforts and investment in selected vertical markets, it's also carving out a good position in the growing mid-sized deal market (i.e. the bit that lies below the mega-deals).

'Indeed, when we recently analysed contract wins in EMEA over the last 18 months (using Datamonitor's contracts database), Atos had won more in the $50-350m bracket than anyone bar IBM. That's a positive sales performance, not least because this segment of the market is highly competitive, since it attracts not just the global mega-deal players but also plenty of “local heroes” and of course Indian challengers.'

That said, some of the results were patchy. Dutch revenues fell by one percent; France grew 6.8%, while the UK was up 5.5%.

As previously reported on sourcingfocus.com, investors Centaurus and Pardus are both still aiming to take a controlling stake in the French company.

Indian graduates from the infamous India Institute of Technology (IIT) are increasingly shunning western IT jobs, preferring to stay at home rather than head for traditional targets like the US and UK, according to growing KPO provider Evaluserve.

In a recent survey of 667 IITians (as they’ve been coined) there has been a significant change in the number of graduates heading west. Between 1964 and 2001 64 percent remained in India while of those that graduated since 2002, 84 percent have remained in India.

While wanting to stay near homes, family and culture was cited as the most common reason for staying in India, there was an increased perception that the US held less job opportunities for IITians; 28 percent thought that the US had limited possibilities for them. Interestingly 19 percent of graduates since 2001 thought that India had substantially increased job opportunities and living standards. Also, 72 percent of the students thought that India held the most promise for IT 10 years down the line.

Oracle Corporation has completed its long awaited acquisition of BEA Systems Inc after gaining approval from the European Commission. Oracle finally paid approximately $8.5 billion for BEA after a tumultuous courtship that began in October 07.

The corporation has enforced its position as the world’s largest software company overcoming the European Commission’s enquiry into potential competition issues.

The EU Commission ruled that “horizontal overlap between the parties' activities would not give rise to competition concerns, in particular since Oracle and BEA were not seen to compete head-to-head.” It also cited that BEA would “face several strong competitors in the overall middleware market and in each of the sub-segments, such as IBM, Sun, Microsoft and SAP”.

Oracle President Charles Phillips said, "The addition of BEA will accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure,"

Accenture has completed its acquisition of SOPIA Corporation, a privately held, Tokyo-based consulting and Information Technology solutions company specializing in Oracle systems integration.

SOPIA will come under the umbrella of Accenture Japan expanding its Oracle capabilities and customer base in the country. The move comes in response to a rise in demand for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in Japan.

“The acquisition is complementary,” said Karl-Heinz Floether, group chief executive of Systems Integration, Technology & Delivery at Accenture. “Accenture benefits from SOPIA’s skills across the entire Oracle suite and supply-chain management software packages, while SOPIA gains access to Accenture’s industry expertise, broad skills in systems integration and its global reach.”  

British Sky Broadcasting, operator of the UK’s largest digital pay television platform and fastest growing broadband provider, has recently equipped its field service team with hard-wearing mobile computers from Intermec.

BSkyB has purchased over 2,000 of the compact Intermec CN3 handheld computers with an extended life battery with an aim of aiding integration between the entertainment company’s engineers and support systems.

BSkyB engineers will now receive updated work instructions throughout the day via GPRS, which will also be used to send job details back to the company’s central IT system once a job has been completed. Through the use of the Intermec CN3 devices, BSkyB expects to benefit from exceptionally user-friendly communication tools for their people as well as a greater capacity to manage exceptions on the day.

As Marion Scott, Head of Supply Chain Development at BSkyB commented: “Intermec was awarded the contract because the CN3 out-performed all other handhelds. The units have now been successfully rolled out to the field and are playing an important supporting role towards our goal of delivering outstanding customer service.”

Paul Smith, CEO of offshore software services, Harvey Nash received the Gold Partner award for outstanding contribution to Vietnam’s software industry at last night’s Sao Khue awards in Hanoi.

The awards ceremony, hosted by the Vietnam Software Association (VINASA), honours individuals and organisations that have helped develop and champion Vietnam's software industry. The country's Deputy Prime Minister, Nguyen Thien Nhan, presented the awards and praised the significant contribution that the sector has made to the country’s socio-economic development.

Commenting on his award, Paul Smith, said: “I am flattered and touched that the people of Vietnam have presented me with this Gold Partner award. Harvey Nash has been working in Vietnam for over eight years now and will continue to invest significantly in its people and infrastructure. Vietnam is a highly attractive offshore destination and has all the ingredients to become the leading market choice in the next few years.”

Butler Group, Europe’s leading IT research and advisory organisation, has released wide-scale report stating that ‘communications architecture that has evolved over the last 20 years no longer meets the requirements of today’s organisations’. This is likely to lead to a spate of outsourcing deals as companies try to bring themselves up to date.

The report ‘Communications and Collaboration Report – Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility’ says that organisations are moving ‘from traditional hierarchies based on command and control, to looser structures utilising collaboration and team work shifting from one-to-one to many-to-many communication’.

The report also found that in order to keep up with the modern business world and enable flexibility, enterprises require IP-based infrastructures to capitalise on information mobility. This new communication infrastructure will aid the development of decentralised business models where location of the workforce is no longer a key issue; something that mobile working is making a necessity.

Mark Blowers, Enterprise Architectures Practice Director at Butler Group and co-author of the study said: “The need for new and enhanced service provision to support business requirements must drive infrastructure and technology deployment. There should be a move towards the provision of common integrated communication services, which are ideal for catering for a complex and distributed environment. Web services can also be utilised to mobilise information to all stakeholders”.

“The componentisation and services-based approach increases flexibility, enabling services to be developed independent of the equipment. Using IP-based components instead of vendor-dependent solutions improves scalability, along with driving down infrastructure costs with price/performance optimisation.”

TDX Group, the provider of analytics-based debt management solutions, and BancTec, a global provider of advanced, high-volume document and payment processing services and solutions, are working together to provide financial institutions with a fully managed IVA processing outsource service.

TDX Group formed “The Insolvency Exchange” 17 months ago and, with BancTec supplying the processing systems, is now providing a full end-to-end insolvency management platform that processes Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) proposals on behalf of creditors, analytically decides which proposals to accept, optimises the lifetime return and manages each IVA through the 5 year term of the arrangement.

BancTec’s experience in mail room business process outsourcing (BPO) in the financial sector and ability to automate and streamline document and labour intensive transactional processes, brings the latest technologies and a business process infrastructure capable of efficiently processing all IVA cases and debtor payments. This significantly reduces the time taken for all IVAs handled through TIX, ensuring each IVA is properly considered.

Says Carol Hine, Head of TIX Operations, “By employing BancTec’s payment and document processing competences, which greatly improves our processing timelines, TDX Group is left to focus on its own core competences of analytics-based debt management.”

Processing IVA proposals is labour-intensive as they tend to be non-standard, with pertinent information scattered throughout the document. Without appropriate management systems this can lead to duplication, delays, and lost paperwork. “However”, says Carol Hine, “outsourcing has dramatically improved the average time for each proposal to be appropriately processed. One of our clients is now seeing savings of between 10% - 20% of the total value of debt being written off. The total of debt write-offs in 2006 was over €10 billion and the TIX programme is leading to some considerable savings for a major High Street bank.”

TIX and BancTec are now working with the major practitioners and the Insolvency Service to formulate common standards to apply across the IVA process throughout the industry. Currently the TIX platform now handles approximately 80% of all IVAs completed within the UK. Many new customers have come on-board the TIX platform to share similar benefits including some of the largest creditor organisations in the country.

EDS has been awarded a seven-year, $391 million contract by the US state of Georgia to design, develop and implement a new-generation Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS). The new system will provide fiscal agent and enrollment broker services and establish electronic health records (EHRs) for Medicaid recipients.

The EDS Georgia interChange system will provide the platform to support delivery of fiscal agent services to Georgia's 45,000 Medicaid providers, who annually care for more than 1.2 million beneficiaries. Georgia operates the nation's eighth-largest Medicaid program in the nation.

The contract returns EDS to Georgia as the state's fiscal agent after a five-year hiatus and brings to 22 the number of states for which EDS serves as fiscal agent or principal IT provider. EDS previously served as the state's fiscal agent from 1986-2003.

In addition to providing claims processing for health care providers and enabling EHRs for Medicaid recipients, the Web-based system will provide Georgia with greater flexibility. It also will provide the state with data analysis about health care trends and outcomes of Georgia's Medicaid population to assess needs and impacts of current programs. Additionally, the system will help the state identify potential fraud and abuse.